{"id":1890,"date":"2004-03-19T22:51:23","date_gmt":"2004-03-20T03:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/19\/1890.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:25","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:25","slug":"president-bush-reaffirms-resol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/19\/president-bush-reaffirms-resol\/","title":{"rendered":"President Bush Reaffirms Resolve to War on Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger admits that this space was reserved for a vicious and nasty analysis—well, no, not an analysis, just an attack, really, on Our Only President’s speech<\/a> marking a year since we invaded Iraq. That won’t be happening here. It was a good speech, taken on its terms, well-written, well-delivered.\n

I disagree with it, but that’s hardly the point.\n

Our Only President is being challenged by a man who charges that this administration alienated allies, that it acted unilaterally, that it must share the burdens it has taken up. This speech defangs that idea entirely.\n

First of all, of course, he spoke in front of a row of flags of the nations, providing a, you know, backdrop of multilaterality. Then, in the speech, he talked about other countries. In 2,343 words, there were more than seventy-five country names. Eight different times during the speech, in various contexts, he made a list of at least three countries, leading up to the list of twenty-two nations who have lost soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. You could not, listening to him, accuse him of ignoring the rest of the world, and acting only on our own narrow national interests.\n

Unless, of course, you are paying attention. Afghanistan and Iraq are different places, and were invaded under different conditions. One can give the administration credit for building a coalition to invade Afghanistan, without letting them off the hook for arrogance and unilateralism in Iraq. But if you don’t notice that he conflates the two, you may will be convinced that he works well with other nations.\n

The second point he makes, and makes clearly and powerfully, is that we are at war with terrorists. Not just Americans, either (tying in to the above point): “the civilized world is at war.” The war is not, he says, a figure of speech. There are no neutrals, and there can be no surrender. You are either with him, or you are with the terrorists, and there will never be any peace until he wins. Time to choose sides.\n

Of course, the world he describes is a nightmare. I can’t accept it. Yes, there are people who have committed and conspired to commit vast crimes, and they should be caught, tried, and (if convicted) punished. Yes, we have not allocated enough resources to fighting terror in the past, and that was an error. But that does not make it a war. I do not see a war with terrorists (whoever they are), and if I did, I could not accept a war without the possibility of surrender, and if I could, the nature of war is that neutrality does and must exist, and should be respected. So I can refuse to choose sides; I reject his premise. If you accept it, though, support for him follows naturally and gladly.\n

That is, in part, because of his third point. What is needed to win this war? Resolve. Determination. Unity. To be “strong and steady”. What has happened so far is a good thing; we must continue as we have begun, for to falter in any way, to change paths (even to a better one) is a sign of weakness and retreat. Our Only President put away most of his shrugs and smirks, his jocularity, his youth, and his ranch hand manner. He showed steel. He showed exactly the sort of resolve we want in a leader in a good cause. He was our Churchill, our pillar of strength, our rock. He didn’t exult, and he didn’t waver. He didn’t trudge, either; he showed no sign of weariness or strain. Heck, if I believed in this war, if I believed he was on the right track, he showed exactly the demeanor I would have wanted.\n

So, what did he do, in this speech, whose occasion itself is a scandal and an accusation? He cut the legs out from under the argument of his main contender, he asked us all to choose between his leadership and violent death, and he exemplified the resolve that he called for, and which, if accepted, can only mean his continued leadership. For twenty minutes, he portrayed a world where he leads the world against an evil army of terrorists. And he portrayed it all extremely well.\n

I may well write in even more detail later. Now, I need some sleep. Feh.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger admits that this space was reserved for a vicious and nasty analysis\u2014well, no, not an analysis, just an attack, really, on Our Only President\u2019s speech marking a year since we invaded Iraq. That won\u2019t be happening here….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16960,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions\/16960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}